The Center of the World

by Thomas van Essen

  They both agreed that Gina should next focus her efforts on Stokes and his circle, particularly on those who had purchased art from him.

  “But you need to move very carefully,” Bryce said. “The painting we seek could very well still be in the hands of their descendants. We need to be careful that they don’t notice someone suspicious poking around in their ancestors’ affairs.”

  As she was getting ready to leave she asked if they had heard anything else about the man in Princeton.

  “Ah, I’m glad you mentioned it. I am keeping half an eye on the fellow, just in case, even though George says there is nothing there. George asked me to send you his regards. You impressed him quite favorably, which is unusual, I must say. He said that if I had to ‘send another rookie down on a field trip’ it might as well be you. He even forgave you for picking up that photo on the bureau, which is also unusual. George is quite severe.”

  She didn’t recall that George was in the room when she had picked up Henry’s photograph. “He’s awfully good,” she said.

  “Of course,” Bryce said. “I only hire the best people.” He raised her hand to his dry lips again. “You have done well, my dear, very well.”

  . 32 .

  THERE IS SOMETHING UNEARTHLY, David, about this great house now that it is nearly deserted. Before, there was always a subdued hum and clatter about the place, just audible above the threshold of hearing—the footfalls of the servants as they went about their business, the sound of conversation as one was about to enter a room. But now I often hear only my own footsteps as I walk through the gallery of Greek and Roman statues. I feel like a ghost haunting the necropolis of some ancient city.

  At dinner last night Mrs. Spencer forgot herself and allowed a long silence to descend on the table. “It is a damn queer business,” Lord Egremont said at last, “just the four of us sitting down to our meat. It don’t seem natural.”

  “Your nature, my lord, is to be a social creature,” she said, rising to the task. “Not all men are so constituted.” She looked at me and Turner for help.

  “The artist is often solitary. Not like the great man,” Turner said as he nodded toward Egremont, “having to deal with tenants and petitioners, other lords. He must be social to fulfill his function in this world. It’s rum, but when I am in the midst of thinking about some hard problem in my studio, I find myself falling into debates within my own mind. Solitary, but not alone. Not usually agreeable company, but one must listen when the other fellow talking lives in one’s brain.”

  “Perhaps now that we all live alone we will all become artists. Or at least,” Mrs. Spencer directed one of her brightest smiles to Turner, “artists’ assistants.”

  “No, no.” Turner was more abrupt than the occasion seemed to warrant. “I am grateful for your assistance. Nor do I wish to appear more rude than is my wont. But you are not artists. You are charming and beautiful, Mrs. Spencer; you, Mr. Grant, are young and pleasant and damnably learned. You, my lord, are almost all things, but not, as you yourself have confessed to me many times, an artist.”

  “What I meant,” Mrs. Spencer said, “was that perhaps the two of us, Mr. Grant and myself, will have some part in the creation of your next painting that might justify our thinking of ourselves as artists.”

  Turner put his fork down and looked at Mrs. Spencer intently. “You are a clever woman, madam. Don’t spoil your reputation. Committees are only good for hanging.” Turner paused and began to laugh, but his laughter was met by silence.

  “I mean, you see, that there is a hanging committee—the committee that decides where to hang the paintings at the annual Royal Academy show. A committee is only good for hanging, you know.” And with a quick motion he tied an imaginary noose round his neck and jerked it upward. “A joke, you see, about committees not being good for very much.”

  Mrs. Spencer managed to ignore Turner’s rudeness and laugh at his joke, while Egremont and I each summoned up a smile. “You are right,” she went on, “I cannot understand what goes on in an artist’s mind. It is far beyond me. But what is it that you have been discussing with yourself these last few days?”

  “Queer thing to ask a man when he is trying to do his duty by the finest venison to be had in England. My compliments, sir.” He raised his glass to Lord Egremont and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “But a good question.” Turner took another sip of wine. “You recall those poses I asked you to strike this afternoon, Mr. Grant?” The question was directed to me, but he looked at Mrs. Spencer as he spoke.

  “I do,” I said. I am not sure how much I gave away to the others, but I believe I may have blushed. I do not know what power the man has, but I had gone along meekly as Turner asked me to assume a number of poses which even now, in the privacy of my own chamber, I blush to recollect.

  “I am trying,” Turner said, “to see the body. How to go about it? Not usually my line, you know. Go to the North Gallery and look at His Lordship’s collection of sculptures. Every feature perfect. Every figure perfect. This table is an odd one. Half the people at it are almost perfectly beautiful. And I mean you no offense, my lord, when I mention that neither you nor I are of that party. You blush, Mrs. Spencer, but it is a fact. I do not flatter. If you walk about London you will see a thousand women before you see one half as perfect in her beauty as you. You are the classical ideal. The other nine hundred and ninety-nine are not. And the same goes for you, Mr. Grant.

  “But you are monsters. His Lordship and I are the mass. No one would put us in a classical landscape. We would be in one of Wilkie’s paintings, or one by Collins. Singing a song around a forge, you know, or bickering with a peddler.

  “What I am trying to say is that it is damn hard to put the true body in a classical painting. I can put in a true tree or the true light as the sun sets. But when I try to put in a figure all I can see are copies of His Lordship’s sculptures. In all my sketches until today you have appeared like something out of a third-rate Old Master’s workshop. It is your damn beauty. Not your fault. Mine. So what I was trying to do was see you as I had been unable to see you previously.”

  Turner took a sip of wine and returned to his meat for a moment. When he spoke again it was more as if he was engaging with his imaginary interlocutor than with us. “All of this. This wine. This meat. This house. This countryside. And all the shades of light that illuminate them. It is all a burden. A blessing, too, of course, because, you know, we wouldn’t have anything if it were not for everything. But for the artist, you see, all this is a burden, a weight. Sometimes I feel it on my shoulders, pressing me down. Or a curtain. Heavy rich stuff—some tapestry, you know. One can’t see truth through it. But I do what I can. Sometimes a speck of light peeps through.”

  “And have you managed to catch a glimpse of the truth these last few days?” I asked.

  “One never sees the truth, Mr. Grant; perhaps, at best, just a glimpse of what it might be. Sounds like nonsense, I suppose.

  “Lonely craft, painting. Making the thing—the mixing, the state of the brush, the tension of the canvas—takes up most of my thoughts. But then there is the philosophy of the business. Too hard a knot for me to untie. Shakespeare, you know. A tedious answer which resolves nothing. But you deserve it for asking such a question.”

  Mrs. Spencer managed to direct the conversation to other topics until we had made our way through the cheese. As we rose from the table Turner excused himself and went straight to his bedroom. Lord Egremont complained that he was not feeling well and asked Mrs. Spencer to accompany him upstairs. I asked that tea be brought to me in the Carved Room.

  I had Turner’s conversation in my mind as I sat down with the Iliad, in both Pope’s and Chapman’s translations, before me. Only the Greek was satisfactory. I tried to see those heroes, their bodies perspiring, grimy with the toil of battle. Homer is unblinking when he tells us where the spear entered and how the viscera spilled out on the battlefield. I saw the beautifully articulated muscles of the abdomen cut apart
like so much meat in a butcher shop. This truth that Turner seems to be seeking, I reflected, resides in the flesh. I thought of us together, David, and the truth that we sometimes find there. Do you know of what I am speaking?

  I was so absorbed in these thoughts that I felt Mrs. Spencer’s touch on my shoulder before I heard her footfall. In her velvet slippers, with a loose robe of Chinese silk over her dressing gown, she could have been one of the Percy spirits haunting the halls of their ancestral home.

  “I must,” she said, “have something stronger than tea.” A servant appeared carrying a decanter and two glasses. As soon as he had departed, Mrs. Spencer filled the glasses and handed one to me. “You must have at least a glass of brandy. I am in danger of becoming a coarse old woman. At least it isn’t gin.”

  Mrs. Spencer took a deep swallow, shivering as the beverage went down. “That’s better,” she said.

  “Egremont feels poorly,” she continued. “Yet I do not believe he is in any imminent danger, or that we need call a doctor. Few men have been as indefatigable and energetic as His Lordship, so he rages at his unfamiliar loss of vigor. He is well enough in public, but when we two are alone it is sometimes another matter. He has been, and is, most kind to me, but he can be demanding. I sometimes think he resents my youth and health. He cannot help it. But he is sleeping now; there is a servant in the room who has been instructed to call me if he wakes.”

  We sat for a while in silence. The fireplace lit up the carvings on the walls so that the wooden leaves seemed to wave in the firelight.

  “So what has Turner required of you these last few days?” she asked. I hesitated as I recalled my recent afternoons in the studio. Mrs. Spencer placed her hand on my knee. “You and I, we must have no secrets from each other. Not at this time. I will be a good example and begin. Before I went up to the studio yesterday His Lordship spoke to me as he was getting dressed. He said, ‘You will be paying Mr. Turner a visit in his studio this morning. He is a great man. It is my desire that you be most accommodating and help him in his enterprise.’ I understood what he meant. When I arrived in the studio Turner was sitting behind his easel, preparing his paints. The couch from the Red Room had been brought up.”

  “I know the couch,” I said. “The fabric is not so agreeable on the skin as I would have thought.”

  She smiled and took another sip of brandy. “Turner greeted me cordially, but, I thought, somewhat coolly. I did not wish to take the burden of what we were about to do upon myself. If Turner wanted something of me, he would have to ask for it. I sat down on the couch. We eyed each other for a moment like two dogs first meeting on the street.

  “ ‘Come,’ he said at length, ‘We are old friends. You are a woman of the world. I am a man of the world. I will not eat you. I have my work to do. You yours. We will begin easy.’ He handed me a robe and said I should get undressed behind the screen. He had me recline on the couch and open the robe so that my breasts and shoulders were exposed. I did not know what to think. There was a battle within me. I felt humiliated and ashamed. If I were the true lady of Petworth, I would never have been lying naked in front of a man who was not my husband. But then I thought: this is so easy. I remembered my younger days, when I knew I could make men mad.”

  Her voice had dropped to a whisper. I looked up from the fire and, seeing the tears in her eyes, handed her a handkerchief. As she began to weep she looked more beautiful than ever.

  “You are most kind. One needs friends at my time of life. How was it,” she asked, “with you? You need not fear me.”

  Seeing me hesitate, perhaps even seeing the color come to my cheeks, she turned her face toward mine. I understood why Egremont wanted her as his mistress and why Turner wanted her as his model and muse. At our best moments I have always felt, David, that I could open up my heart to you without reserve, although I have always been conscious of the differences in perspective between us. This consciousness has, in some small way, constrained the flood of my feelings. As I looked at Mrs. Spencer I felt no such constraint. I too wept as I told her how Turner had me squat upon the couch in the most undignifled and humiliating of postures. I told her how Turner had praised me for my beauty. I confessed with shame and humiliation how I had felt some perverse pleasure in debasing myself before the great man. It was the confession of pleasure that made me weep.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes. Mrs. Spencer filled her glass and emptied it. “I will be spared nothing,” she said. “Nothing.”

  . 33 .

  I THINK OF MYSELF as an infrequent flyer. Whenever we go anywhere other than the Adirondacks, it’s usually on Susan’s miles. She knows which coffee places to avoid in Newark and that the Asian place in Philadelphia is almost worth eating in. I am not used to the anxieties and indignities of the security checkpoints or to the sight of soldiers with automatic weapons in public places.

  As the plane banked and turned, I imagined that the madmen had taken over the cockpit. We would be bearing down on Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, proof positive that the war had done nothing to make us safer. I looked out the window at the dawn-lit patchwork of the English countryside, half convinced that planes from the Royal Air Force would appear in a few minutes. I wondered if I would be able to see the faces of the pilots as they flew alongside trying to determine why Continental Flight 29 wasn’t responding. I wondered how long I would remain conscious after the rockets struck. Or perhaps it wouldn’t be rockets; it would be a nondescript suitcase in the hold. Either way I would dissolve into death and rain down from the sky. Blair and Bush would give a press conference. The passengers would be described as heroes and victims of terror. A fund would be set up; perhaps Susan and the children would get some money. My face would appear in The New York Times. Susan would be free to move in with her lover, although it occurred to me that it was only the fact of my existence that made this particular lover necessary or possible. The painting would remain in the Adirondacks; Mossbacher would find it after Susan sold the place.

  I thought of Helen. She understands this violence. She knows that the men who suffer on the plain behind her tall window are dying on her account. Her cool and indifferent eyes comprehend the determination of the hijacker as he slits the captain’s throat with as much remorse as I feel for the chicken that sits on my plate. She understands the look of victory in his eyes as he pushes the throttle forward. Praise be to God. It is all the same to her.

  The talk on the work of the foundation went well. I am always surprised that people take me seriously as a professional person, which probably goes a long way toward explaining why I’ve had the same small job for twenty years. On Wednesday morning, since I was no longer on the expense account, I moved from the conference hotel to a cheap tourist-class place a few blocks from Victoria Station. The room was small and dark, painted an unpleasant shade of yellow. A television with a twelve-inch screen was mounted on the ceiling at the foot of the bed. The shower in the bathroom was so small that even though I had lost some weight it was a struggle to bend down to pick up a dropped piece of soap.

  My first day on my own was cool and drizzly. I walked along the Thames toward the Tate. I put the collar of my raincoat up and allowed myself to luxuriate in the feeling of being a lonely man in a foreign city. It was six in the morning at home. I wondered if Susan was sleeping alone.

  All the Turners in the Tate seemed related to The Center of the World, but in none of them could I see more than a hint of the truth that my painting revealed. Yet as I walked through the gallery, any doubts I had about its authenticity disappeared. There was something about the sky in many of the other Turners that I recognized at once as the same, although the effect of light seemed pale and unachieved compared with what he accomplished in my painting. There were low suns on the horizon that resembled my sun and architectural details, especially in Rome, from the Vatican, that seemed borrowed from The Center of the World. They were all wonderful paintings, but they only gave a hint of what mine revealed.


  Later that day I walked to the National Gallery and looked at the Turners there. I spent a long time in front of Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus. The poor Cyclops is just a blur in the background, while Ulysses’s gold-encrusted ship is a miracle of invention and delight in the foreground. Just above the horizon a Turner sun is setting. When I stepped close to the canvas I could see Apollo’s chariot and the horses of the sun sketched in with white paint. It was a poor trick compared with what Turner had pulled off in The Center of the World, where the gods seemed vividly present, even if they were not represented in any visible way.

  A steady rain was falling when I left the National Gallery. The crowd that had filled Trafalgar Square earlier in the day had disappeared. I pulled my baseball cap down and turned up the collar of my raincoat. The city was gray. The fact that traffic was going in the wrong direction made me feel disconcerted, almost nauseous.

  I headed vaguely west toward Mayfair. A curtain seemed to be falling, but I did not understand why. I liked the city I was in; I liked the idea of being where I was. I had just seen some beautiful paintings. I possessed something more beautiful still. I was free.

  At a newsstand I looked at the tabloid photos of heavy-breasted young women. They are the debased daughters, I thought, of Helen. I bought a pack of cigarettes, even though I hadn’t smoked in almost fifteen years. I had wanted a cigarette ever since I arrived in England, probably to prove to myself that I was free and could do whatever I wanted. It wasn’t quite as pathetic as the kiss with Ruth Carpenter, but it was the same sort of impulse. I stood under the awning in front of the store and tapped the pack against the heel of my left hand three times before I tore the cellophane off. I stuck a cigarette in my mouth and lit it. Fifteen years seemed to melt away as I performed that once familiar automatic gesture, but I coughed as I inhaled.